Amelia

discussed in biography

Two years later Amelia was published. Being a much more sombre work, it has always been less popular than Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews. Fielding’s mind must have been darkened by his experiences as a magistrate, as it certainly had been by his wife’s death, and Amelia is no attempt at the comic epic poem in prose. Rather, it anticipates the Victorian domestic novel,...

place in English literature

...Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great (1743), for instance, uses a mock-heroic idiom to explore a derisive parallel between the criminal underworld and England’s political elite, and Amelia (1751) probes with sombre precision images of captivity and situations of taxing moral paradox.